Unprecedented Collaboration of Business, Government and Technology Enthusiasts to Tackle Social and Civic Challenges

Events in 83 Cities will Mark National Day of Civic Hacking by Using Publicly Available Data and Entrepreneurial Thinking to Spur Innovation

Washington, D.C. – May 31, 2013 – This weekend, more than 6,000 individuals representing businesses, nonprofits, government agencies and local citizens will team up to participate in 96 events throughout the United States as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. The effort's goal is to make people's lives better by working together to solve social challenges facing local communities.

A civic hacker is someone who uses a minimum amount of resources and a maximum amount of brainpower and ingenuity to solve a problem. Participating civic hackers will develop new solutions to old challenges – from an app that allows rural communities to track private water wells and prevent water supply contamination to developing platforms that expand access to energy consumption data.

Intel Corporation, as a headlining sponsor of National Day of Civic Hacking, is paving the way for how individuals can benefit from increased access to data and information. On June 1 and 2, in cities across the country, civic hackers, government and businesses are stepping up to the challenge of how to use technology to improve the quality of life in their communities.

"The world has been madly digitizing everything from music and books to business transactions and scientific data," said Dr. Genevieve Bell, Intel Labs Director, Interaction & Experience Research. "There is a gold mine of insight and wisdom that lies within all our digital information, but we have only begun to understand its potential when put in the hands of citizens. The National Day of Civic Hacking is critical to educating and engaging citizens in this emerging 'data society' so people can start to explore how to harness the power of digital information and share it with others to unleash new, unexpected and serendipitous opportunities."

Many of the weekend's challenges will incorporate an unprecedented amount of shared data from over 22 federal agencies including the White House Office of Digital Strategy, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, NASA, the Department of Labor, the Census Bureau, the National Science Foundation, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Peace Corps, USAID and dozens of local and state governments across the country. Civic hackers will relay this data to the general public through tools, apps and platforms that aim to make people's lives better.

"Imagine all the good that can be done by developers and other innovators with the growing troves of data the federal government has been making available – data on everything from hospital pricing to drinking water safety to natural disasters and much more," said Todd Park, Assistant to President Obama and U.S. Chief Technology Officer. "Americans paid for these data resources and deserve easy access to them, and we applaud the many innovators who are leveraging this information to create apps and services that help address key challenges, improve lives, and grow the economy."

The National Day of Civic Hacking is the largest convening of civic hackers to ever assemble and is part of a growing grassroots trend. Increasingly, savvy individuals are using their talents to tackle problems they encounter in their daily lives and see within their communities. Those responsible for driving this recent trend are not only tech professionals from Silicon Valley; they are also everyday citizens from communities across the United States who use a minimum amount of resources to create or enhance open source solutions.

As part of National Day of Civic Hacking, the foundation founded by pop icon will.i.am is hosting an event focused on engaging young people in civic hacking in Los Angeles. "Everything we can do to engage local communities, especially our young people, in technology and innovation helps us to create a stronger LA and a stronger America. I'm proud to support this amazing event in Boyle Heights, and I can't wait to see the apps and ideas that come out of it," said will.i.am.

National Day of Civic Hacking is being led by SecondMuse with organizing support from partners including: Code for America, Innovation Endeavors and Random Hacks of Kindness. The sponsors of this initiative include Intel, Edelman, CodeForGood, Rally Software, Elance and Socrata.

For more information about National Day of Civic Hacking's partners and challenges, download the fact sheet and visit www.hackforchange.org.

About Innovation Endeavors
Innovation Endeavors empowers the best and brightest to connect and launch game-changing ventures. Founded in 2010 by Dror Berman and funded by Eric Schmidt, Innovation has backed over 100 entrepreneurs and more than 50 early stage companies. Learn more at: www.innovationendeavors.com.

About SecondMuse
SecondMuse is an innovation and collaboration agency. SecondMuse co-creates prosperity by applying the art and science of collaboration to solve complex problems. Founded in 2008, SecondMuse has worked with over 300 clients around the world to co-design and co-create solutions to complex social challenges. Some examples of SecondMuse's work include: Random Hacks of Kindness, Launch, and International Space Apps Challenge. www.secondmuse.com

About Code for America
Founded in 2009, Code for America (CfA) is a nonprofit collaborating with local governments to foster and facilitate innovation. CfA is known for its fellowship program, which embeds tech and design professionals in local governments explore new approaches to resolving local challenges. Through the Accelerator, Brigade, and Peer Network programs, CfA is connecting cities with startups and volunteers, as well as each other: http://codeforamerica.org.

About Intel
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is a world leader in computing innovation. The company designs and builds the essential technologies that serve as the foundation for the world’s computing devices. Additional information about Intel is available at newsroom.intel.com and blogs.intel.com.

Intel is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries.

About Edelman
Edelman is the world's largest public relations firm, with 67 offices and more than 4,800 employees worldwide, as well as affiliates in more than 30 cities. Edelman was named Advertising Age's top-ranked PR firm of the decade in 2009 and one of its "A-List Agencies" in both 2010 and 2011; Adweek's "2011 PR Agency of the Year;" PRWeek's "2011 Large PR Agency of the Year;" and The Holmes Report's "2011 Global Agency of the Year" and its 2012 "Digital Agency of the Year." Edelman was named one of the "Best Places to Work" by Advertising Age in 2010 and 2012 and among Glassdoor's top ten "Best Places to Work" in 2011 and 2012. Edelman owns specialty firms Edelman Berland (research), Blue (advertising), BioScience Communications (medical communications), and agencies Edelman Significa (Brazil), and Pegasus (China). Visit http://www.edelman.com/ www.edelman.com for more information.

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

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Haswell revealed: Intel spills the beans on its 4th-gen Core processor

Been waiting on a processor and mainboard upgrade — or a new desktop — until Intel’s Haswell chips are available? Good move. Intel’s fourth-gen Core processors are coming soon, and they’re going to be awesome.
Haswell chips are built using a 22nm die, just like their Sandy Bridge predecessors. They’ll primarily drop into mainboards with an LGA1150 socket, though the top-end Core i7 beasts will require LGA2011. Quad-core options will start off with the Haswell Core i5. Moving up to an i7 will get you Hyper-Threading support — which means four cores and a total of eight threads. At the top of the range, Intel will offer a six-core hyper-threaded beast with 10 to15MB of L3 cache memory. The lower-end chips will ship with 6 to 8MB.
All the new Haswell chips will feature built-in Intel HD 4600 GPUs. They can output full 1080P 3D visuals, push content wirelessly to your displays using Intel’s WiDi tech, and seamlessly switch back and forth between graphics modes. Just like it does on Sandy Bridge, LucidLogic’s slick Virtu GPU virtualization software will help Haswell chips deliver efficient rendering whenever possible and slam on the accelerator when you’re performing more graphically intensive tasks. Back at CES, Intel’s demo showed that the HD4600 has enough oomph to keep up with an Nvidia GTX650.
Yes, we’re finally getting to the point where integrated graphics provide PC users with pretty decent gaming performance. It couldn’t have happened at a better time, either. The Windows Store has put addictive casual titles  like Angry Birds and Where’s My Water? — as well as more intense Xbox games like The Harvest and Reckless Racing — within easy reach. Haswell will ensure that the masses have the power they need to enjoy silky-smooth desktop gaming, even if they don’t want to spend extra cash on a graphics card.
Now read: Intel says Haswell will provide a 50 percent boost in battery life
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ARM’s Cortex-A12 to offer 40 percent performance gain for mid-range phones and tablets

Look at any smartphone or tablet vendor and they will be pushing their premium devices pretty hard. But the market for $400+ premium devices is only so big, and consumers are expected to be buying more mid-range phones or tablets ($250-$350 price range) by 2015. Chip maker ARM is responding to that growing market by unveiling the Cortex-A12 chip.
While aimed at mid-range devices, the Cortex-A12 is definitely no slouch in the performance department. It’s the successor to the Cortex-A9 and moves from a 40nm process to 28nm. That makes the chip 30 percent smaller, and when combined with the new design, achieves a 40 percent performance gain using the same power draw.
ARM has also added a few key new features to the chip, the first of which is the ability to combine the A12 with a Cortex-A7 processor in a big.LITTLE setup. That makes it a very scalable chip to suit a devices’ processing needs. The A12 also includes virtualization and TrustZone technology, allowing devices using it to double as a work solution as well as your personal smartphone or tablet. ARM also lets the chip address up to 1TB of memory, which I’m pretty sure no vendor will come anywhere near testing the limits of in their devices.

You’ll also be happy to hear the A12 has been paired with ARM’s Mali-T622 GPU, which has full OpenCL 1.1, OpenGL/ES 3.0, and DirectX 11 support as well as handling 1080p30 video playback. And it does that while only using half the power of the first generation Mali-T600 GPUs. Finally, you can throw in a Mali-V500 for video playback, and with it go from 1080p60 right through to 4K output at 120fps depending on the configuration.
The ARM Cortex-A12 certainly looks promising. 40 percent more performance than a Cortex-A9 combined with 1080p output using half the power draw even with the entry level chip is sure to have Intel taking notice. It’s also going to secure ARM a new round of licensing deals with smartphone and tablet manufacturers.
Now read: Samsung pulls the covers off the 4.3-inch Galaxy S4 Mini
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Permabit Technology extends primary data deduplication software

Permabit Technology Corp. this week added compression and replication applications that can be built into its Albireo Virtual Data Optimizer primary data deduplication software in hopes of making it more appealing to OEM vendors.

Permabit Technology developed Albireo dedupe for storage array vendors in 2010. It has only one announced OEM partner -- Hitachi Data Systems, which uses Albireo in its Hitachi network-attached storage (NAS) platform. Permabit added Albireo Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) in 2011 to provide inline deduplication and thin provisioning for Linux-based storage. VDO is aimed at low-end NAS systems and flash arrays.

Permabit CEO Tom Cook mentioned NetGear, Synology, QNAP, Buffalo Technology and similar systems as potential small- to medium-sized VDO customers. He said vendors selling all-flash arrays are also candidates.

"VDO was designed in part to address the flash market," Cook said. "All-flash arrays commonly use Linux. We have licenses in that space, and we will work to implement compression and replication [into VDO implementations for flash]."

Albireo Compress and Replica are plug-ins for OEMs that use VDO. Compress performs inline block-level compression. Permabit claims it has a sequential write performance of 750 MB per second. It is a variation of the Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm, but optimized for random access block storage. Dedupe and compression are always on for systems running VDO Compress. VDO deduplicates redundant blocks and compresses other unique blocks.

Albireo Replica provides bandwidth optimization for data in transit, improving replication performance between storage systems running VDO deduplication. Replica only sends new blocks across the wire and it supports many-to-one replication. Cook said the lightweight application can be easily integrated into a VDO client.

Dave Simpson, a senior analyst at 451 Research, said dedupe and compression are valuable features for flash vendors looking to shrink the footprint of data on solid-state drives that have smaller capacities than most hard drives. He said flash startups in particular would benefit from getting data reduction through an OEM partner.

"This would not be easy for smaller flash guys to develop," he said. "I'm not ruling out big vendors as OEM partners, but they can build it. For the smaller vendors, this is not where they're going to put their R&D [research and development] dollars. It's complex stuff."

Permabit Technology's compression and replication applications will be available to OEM partners May 31.

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